Prairie Ghost: Pronghorn and Human Interaction in Early America

By Richard E. McCabe, Henry M. Reeves and Bart W. O'Gara

A Wildlife Management Institute Book

In this lavishly illustrated volume Richard E. McCabe, Bart W. O'Gara and Henry M. Reeves explore the fascinating relationship of pronghorn with people in early America, from prehistoric evidence through the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876. The only one of fourteen pronghorn-like genera to survive the great extinction brought on by human migration into North America, the pronghorn has a long and unique history of interaction with humans on the continent, a history that until now has largely remained unwritten.

 With nearly 150 black-and-white photographs, 16 pages of color illustrations, plus original artwork by Daniel P. Metz, Prairie Ghost: Pronghorn and Human Interaction in Early America tells the intriguing story of humans and these elusive big game mammals in an informative and entertaining fashion that will appeal to historians, biologists, sportsmen and the general reader alike.

Winner of the Wildlife Society's Outstanding Book Award for 2005

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Release date: Oct 15, 2010
• ISBN: 9781607321118

Book preview

PRAIRIE GHOST

PRAIRIE GHOST

Pronghorn and Human Interaction

in Early America

Richard E. McCabe, Bart W. O’Gara and Henry M. Reeves

Illustrated by Daniel P. Metz

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF COLORADO

A WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT INSTITUTE BOOK

The Wildlife Management Institute (WMI) is a private, nonprofit, scientific and educational organization, based in Washington, DC. WMI’s sole objective, since its founding in 1911, has been to advance restoration and sound management of North America’s wildlife resources. As part of WMI’s program, scientific information generated through research and management experiences is consolidated, published and used to strengthen resource decision making, management opportunities and methodologies, and general understanding of and appreciation for wildlife and their habitats. Prairie Ghost: Prong-horn and Human Interaction in Early America is one of 30 books produced by WMI since 1942, including the award-winning Ducks, Geese and Swans of North America, Big Game of North America, Mule and Black-tailed Deer of North America, Elk of North America, White-tailed Deer: Ecology and Management, Ecology and Management of the Mourning Dove, Ecology and Management of the Wood Duck, Ecology and Management of the North American Moose, and North American Elk: Ecology and Management. For additional information about WMI, its publications, programs and membership, write to Wildlife Management Institute, 1146 19th Street, Suite 700, NW, Washington, DC 20036. Or, see the website www.wildlifemanagementinstitute.org.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Wildlife Management Institute. All inquiries should be directed to Wildlife Management Institute Publications, 1146 19th Street, Suite 700, NW, Washington, DC 20036.

© 2004 by the Wildlife Management Institute

Published by the University Press of Colorado

5589 Arapahoe Avenue, Suite 206C

Boulder, Colorado 80303

All rights reserved

First paperback edition 2010

Printed in the United States of America

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State College, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Mesa State College, Metropolitan State College of Denver, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, and Western State College of Colorado.

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McCabe, Richard E.

   Prairie ghost : pronghorn and human interaction in early

America / Richard E. McCabe, Bart W. O’Gara, and Henry

M. Reeves ; illustrated by Daniel P. Metz.

      p. cm.

   A Wildlife Management Institute book.

   Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

   ISBN 0-87081-758-2 (hardcover : alk. paper)

   ISBN 978-0-87081-954-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Pronghorn antelope—North America—History. 2.

Human animal relationships—North America—History. I.

O’Gara, Bart W. II. Reeves, Henry M. III. Title.

   QL737.U52M38 2004

   599.63’9’097—dc22

                                                                2004001011

Design and layout by Daniel Pratt

19   18   17   16   15   14   13   12   11   10         10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Credit information for endsheet artwork can be found following the index.

Dedication

Prairie Ghost: Pronghorn and Human Interaction in Early America is dedicated to Bart W. O’Gara and Jim D. Yoakum, the preeminent pronghorn scientists of the twentieth century. Few other individuals or partners have had such a profound and impressive impact on the conservation and management of a North American big game species as have these two wildlife biologists.

The co-dedication of this book to Bart, one of its co-authors, may seem a bit unorthodox. However, Bart died just weeks before Prairie Ghost and its companion volume, Pronghorn: Ecology and Management, which he co-edited with Jim, went to press. His co-authors of Prairie Ghost, and his other many associates, friends all, are consoled that, although he did not see these books to publication, Bart characteristically, and in his unwavering gentlemanly manner, made sure they were completed. We miss his savvy and friendship. And, whether they know it or not, so do pronghorn.

Bart W. O’Gara

Jim D. Yoakum

Contents

List of Figures

List of Tables

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

---

INTRODUCTION

---

PREHISTORY

The First People

Occupying North America

Means of Subsistence

Distribution of Pronghorn

Vulnerability to Hunting

Capturing Pronghorn

Quantifying Foods Used

Prehistoric Weapons

Artifacts

Burial Offerings

---

HISTORY

Spanish

French and English

Introduction of the Pronghorn to Science

Corps of Discovery

Indians of the West

The Coming of Horses

Bows and Arrows

Firearms

Aboriginal Hunting

Distribution, Processing and Transporting

Cooking and Preserving

Indian Uses of Pronghorn

Captive Pronghorn

Petroglyphs and Pictographs

Decoration

Clans, Societies and Kachinas

Spiritualism

Music

Orientation

Language

Trade

Near Demise of Bison

Near Demise of the People

Near Demise of Pronghorn

Prairie Wraith and the Genesis of Conservation

---

Appendices

References

Index

Figures

Tables

Foreword

What a strange, timid and elusive creature the prong-horn was to the Euro-Americans who first broached North America’s western grasslands. It reminded them of a cabri, or goat, sort of—a very speedy goat. It was difficult to approach, difficult to kill and, when brought down, its hide proved generally meager and its meat palatable but not much more. To modern civilization’s vanguards in the West, the pronghorn was among the more curious features of a vast, un-chartered and infinitely perplexing landscape.

Also strange and curious to the newcomers were the aboriginals—savages they were called—perceived as neither timid nor elusive enough.

In time, goats became antelope. The savages became Indians. Both names still were wrong. Also in time, the antelope and Indians were abused to near extirpation. Unregulated market gunning, wanton shooting, fencing, disease, bad weather and public apathy reduced the former. Disease, bigotry, avarice, technology, Manifest Destiny, public apathy, and a tenacious and inflexible military overwhelmed the latter. Entirely lost, in a span of not more than 250 years, was the relationship of the two curiosities—a complicated nexus that had evolved since pronghorn and Native Americans, the first people, shared grassland, shrubland and desert habitats during a span of not less than 10,000 years.

This book is a sketch of that ethnozoological relationship. It begins with suspected, separate arrivals of humans and antilocaprids on the continent. It ends with the approach of the 20th century, when wild America essentially vanished.

It did not begin as a book, but as a chapter for a monograph on pronghorn ecology and management. We found that there was much to learn and tell—too much, in fact. Clearly, the emerging sketch would unreasonably affect the important monograph’s size and cost. Also, as a chapter, the work would have to be reduced drastically, which, we felt, would compromise understanding of the relationship of prong-horn and people past. This volume, therefore, is a companion to Pronghorn: Ecology and Management, edited by Bart W. O’Gara and Jim D. Yoakum, also a Wildlife Management Institute book, published by The University Press of Colorado.

If ever a book was a team effort, it was this one. To the investment, Milt Reeves brought mounds of data, ideas and leads. Bart O’Gara brought vital organization to our stores of information. We all shared the challenge of discovery of clues to bygone natural and cultural histories. In every sense, this was and is a co-authorship.

Our only struggle in the making of this book was with what not to include—interesting, if not fascinating collateral information, but of limited additional insight or, worse, misleading perspective. We excluded considerable anecdotal information extracted from the historical literature because it could not be separately validated.

Special efforts were made to include only information that was fairly specific to time and place. To generalize about incredibly diverse and temporally dynamic Native American cultures would be to misrepresent them and history itself. And, that would counterfeit the relationship of those peoples with pronghorn.

History, of course, is what was. Hopefully, we learn from our past—from what was—presumably to prevent mistakes in the present and establish safeguards for the future. That really is what this book is about. Hopefully, too, it shows the values of a wildlife species to people, aboriginals, more and better connected to the environment than anyone today. We also hope that it may serve to affirm, or reaffirm for decision makers, that there is wisdom and enduring economy in the conservation and management of natural heritage. And, by acknowledging that this book is not a complete history, merely a sketch, we hope not least of all that other investigators of whatever discipline will add to and improve on the truths of it.

—RICHARD E. MCCABE

Preface

The least known, least understood and perhaps most fascinating big game animal in the Western Hemisphere is the pronghorn. Ironically, it is the most American of the continent’s terrestrial wildlife. The pronghorn is found only in North America and is the sole living member of an ancient family, Antilocapridae, to survive since the early Pliocene. Although referred to as an antelope, the pronghorn is distinct from the true antelopes of Africa.

Even some people who live in the West in close proximity to pronghorn and who occasionally see the animal on open grasslands or shrublands are unfamiliar with this extraordinary species. Few know, for example, that the pronghorn is the second fastest land animal. It lopes easily at 30 miles per hour, cruises at 45 mph, and can maintain a sprint of somewhat more than 60 mph for three or four minutes, in bounds exceeding 20 feet. Such speed in an adult animal about 3 feet high at the shoulder, 4 feet long from chest to rump, and weighing 90 to 140 pounds is enabled by heavily built legs whose bones are said to have 10 times the torque of same-sized bones of cows. Also contributing are a large windpipe and lungs and a heart that is twice as big as that of other animals of similar size.

Few people know that, in addition to its speed, the pronghorn’s eyesight is a major defense against predation. Protuberant eyes allow for a nearly 360-degree field of vision, and pronghorn eyesight is akin to that of a person looking through 8x binoculars. This might account for the fact that people usually only spot pronghorn at some distance, if at all. What viewers tend to see are remote splotches of white rapidly heading for the horizon. Those splotches are white rump patches, featuring 3- to 4-inch white hairs that become erect when the animals are alarmed. On open rangeland in favorable conditions, those rump patches can be seen for a number of miles, although the rest of the animal blends into the background.

The animal derives its name from the male’s horns, which support a forward-point prong several inches below the tip. Females have smaller horns, usually—but not always—absent the prong. Horn sheaths fit over bony horn cores, much like swords fit into scabbards. The cores are permanent parts of the skeletal structure, whereas the sheaths—composed of compressed, cornified, epithelial cellular matter and hair—are shed each year. The pronghorn is the only hoofed animal that sheds its horn sheaths annually.

Some adult males, or bucks, form harems of as many as 16 does during the autumn mating season. Occasionally one, usually two, and rarely three fawns are born to pregnant does in late May and June in northern habitats and from February to April in souther habitats, after a gestation of about 240 days. Weighing only 5 or 6 pounds at birth, pronghorn fawns are able to outrun humans within a few days and elude most other predators within a few months. They reach full maturity by age three.

Pronghorn are primarily grazers, feeding on such vegetation as sagebrush, clover, alfalfa, cheatgrass, wheatgrass and sedges. In some desert areas, they receive water only from moisture in and on vegetation.

Some historical researchers have suggested that, before the West was broached by European explorers, adventurers, and settlers, the pronghorn may have been almost as numerous as the bison—which numbered more than 20 million and perhaps as many as 40 million—west of the Mississippi. In less than 80 years, 1830 to 1910, pronghorn declined from unknown millions to fewer than 15,000. The causes included unregulated gunning for market, subsistence and sport, introduction of cattle ranching on western grasslands, and disease. Other factors included the decline of Native American populations and cultures (and attendant reduction of fires that kept grasses low and produced nutritious forbs), the slaughter of bison (whose winter movements provided travel lanes through and access to plant food beneath deep snows), and some unusually harsh winters.

From near extirpation, the pronghorn rebounded to more than 1 million animals about 75 years later, thanks in part to America’s unique and successful wildlife management system. That recovery also was due, in part, to the unique adaptability of the species. This book is about pronghorn and why and how, unlike today, it was widely known, understood, and appreciated by people of yesteryear, especially those who, like pronghorn, also were Native Americans.

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful for the help, cooperation and enthusiasm extended us by a great many people during the course of preparing this book. In particular, we recognize Glenna J. Dean and staffs of the Valley Library, Oregon State University, Corvallis, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Anthropological Archives and Anthropology Library—both of Washington, DC. Deserving special thanks for their contributions are Lyla Baumann, Bette McKown, Kelly Stockwell, Virginia Johnston and Wilma O’Gara. And without the assistance, patience and skill of Jennifer Rahm, the Wildlife Management Institution’s Assistant Director of Publications, completion of Prairie Ghost: Pronghorn and Human Interaction in Early America would not have been possible.

PRAIRIE GHOST

Introduction

The age-old battle between the wilderness and civilization was waged anew on the western plains, with the age-old results: the disappearance of the wilderness, the depletion and degradation of its aboriginal population, and the virtual extinction of its characteristic fauna.

—Hoopes (1975:12)

Early in wecukanheyaye of a sweltering day of Wípazuk wašté wi in the year remembered as Pehin Hanksa ktepi, fewer than 500 akiæita œuktayka, led by vainglorious Hi-es-tze, fell upside down into a huge village of Tsististas and Lakota temporarily encamped along a 3-mile (4.8 km) serpentine stretch of the Hetanka watercourse of the Cukanweta region. The aggression was ill-conceived, poorly timed and badly executed. Unable and perhaps unwilling to retreat, as many as 1,200 mdetahunka swarmed from the encampment to defend against the improvidently divided force of wasichus.

When the dust of the season When the Ponies Grow Fat finally settled a day and a half later, still during the moon of the chokecherries, the Allies and the People retired south from Greasy Grass Creek to safer havens and better pasturage, 263 longknives were dead, including the man they called Creeping Panther, Long Hair and Yellow Hair.

The defeat by Northern Cheyenne and Sioux Indians of the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry under command of Colonel George Armstrong Custer along the Little Bighorn River in Montana Territory occurred nine days before the centennial celebration of the founding of the United States. The battle was a decisive victory for the Indians. But, it also signaled the last truly successful military resistance by North American Indians to social subjugation and cultural dispossession. Custer’s Last Stand was duplicitously the highwater mark of American Indian defense of homeland, but, in fact, a pyrrhic victory, it was their own last stand.

The fateful scenario that played out on the rolling and gullied steppelands of southcentral Montana actually was a tragedy long in the making. In many respects, such a violent clash of humanity was made inevitable by grossly disparate societies, forced by misunderstanding, arrogance, racism and mutual antipathy to compete for independence on common landscape. In broad, historical context, the Little Bighorn battle site represents the convergence of myriad, backlogged, anthropological indignities. In an empirical, geophysical context, the site, 14 miles (22.5 km) upstream from confluence with the Bighorn River, was mostly a matter of happenstance.

The conjoining of approximately 12,000 renegade and AWOL agency Hunkpapa, Oglala, Minneconjou, Sans Arc and Blackfeet Sioux and Northern Cheyenne was an alliance borne of desperation and wishful thinking. Brought together to strengthen against offensive actions by the U.S. Army, to escape the drudgery and meager charity of reservation life, and to embrace again the relatively carefree, drifting, hunter/gatherer mode of living, the temporary confederation undoubtedly was the largest assembly of Indians ever on the Great Plains and perhaps anywhere in North America.

Twelve thousand people and their gigantic horse herd represented an unprecedented logistical problem (Ambrose 1986:415). They needed an abundance of fresh food, water and forage. A week before the battle, the Indians moved from the valley of Rosebud Creek to adjacent Little Bighorn Valley in search of bison. Despite initial plans to travel elsewhere, they eventually camped (June 22) at the location where Custer was to find them because it was a favorable place from which hunters went across to the west side of the Bighorn River and killed antelope from vast herds (Marquis 1967:3, see also Stewart 1955). Interestingly, at the time of the Reno column’s attack on the south end of the sprawling encampment, the Indians were planning to relocate because the horse herd had depleted grasses on benchlands above the camp and because the pronghorn—vó-ka-e to the Cheyenne and tatokadan to the Sioux—had been scattered, and the quest for bison needed to continue.

Hundreds of pieces of literature have been written about the Little Bighorn battle—its causes, players, mysteries and far-reaching consequences—from which emerged a certain loser and, ultimately, no winner. Because no one of the divided command with Custer survived, the perspective of the vanquished was lost, except to the speculation and imagination of chroniclers who invariably are drawn to historic events so momentous as to defy objective reporting. No matter the viewpoint and discovery of new information, the battle’s outcomes remain the same. The investigators and reporters seem unanimous only about that and the fact that, had the Indian encampment been anywhere else along the Little Bighorn River at that particular time, the conflict and history itself, for better or worse, would have been significantly different. Ironically, little bighorn is a Lakota idiom for pronghorn (Hill 1979).

By no means was that propitious occasion in Ipehin Hanksa Ktipi the first time that pronghorn had been an important aspect and variable in the culture, economy and general welfare of Native Americans.

Prehistory

A cool April wind blows across the sagebrush-covered ridge while the imposing south flank of the Wind River Range stands large against the northern horizon. A herd of pronghorn antelope is bunched up, and the animals appear nervous as they peer across the narrow ridgetop that lies across their traditional route to summer range.

The Indians hidden behind parallel rows of ripped-up sagebrush await their compatriots as they drive the antelope past the sagebrush rows. The antelope trot over a small knoll and into the suddenly-visible corral. The Indian[s] behind the rows of sagebrush show themselves and fill in behind the antelope as the herd passes, forcing the antelope into the corral where other hunters are waiting with their stone-tipped weapons.

The antelope circle the interior of the corral as the hunters hurl spears into their flanks. Soon, the bodies of the dying antelope lie in the soft dune sand. The Indians rejoice—long days of planning, preparation, and anticipation have gone into this hunt. Prayers are said in thanks to the spirits for the success of their efforts. Many antelope have been killed, but now it is the time to remove the hides and strip the meat. The bones of the victims are left behind, telling the story of a people that were intimately familiar with animal behavior and habitats, a skill that meant survival, and they tell a story about the antelope as well.

—Sanders (2000:30–31)

Successors of the Sublette pronghorn herd still migrate annually between Grand Teton National Park and their winter ranges south of Pinedale, Wyoming, as they have for 8,000 years or more. During particularly severe winters, they continue southward to rangelands near the town of Green River, Wyoming, nearly 200 miles (322 km) from their summer range (Sawyer and McWhirter 2000).

To comprehend the ancient interactions between humans and pronghorn, it is necessary to regress through geologic time to an arbitrarily chosen point of beginning. We have selected a time when North America was unpopulated by humans, but many strange animals—herds of camels and horses, huge cave bears, giant ground sloths and armadillos, plus another antilocaprid besides our pronghorn—were ranging over much of western North America. Wooly mammoths grazed on the grasslands and elephant-like mastodons browsed in the forests and shrubsteppes. These creatures were preyed on by wolves, lions, and saber-toothed tigers (Byers 1997). The evolution of the unique pronghorn is addressed in O’Gara and Janis (2004), but humankind’s intrusion into the New World is yet to be told. Anthropologists generally agree that the momentous event occurred near the end of the recently concluded 1.8 million-year Pleistocene Epoch, or Ice Age (Parfit 2000).

During the Pleistocene, successive ice sheets—perhaps as many as 50 (Ruddiman and Wright 1987, Dansgaard et al. 1993)—separated by intervening warming periods, formed and pushed southward. Each retreated northward and to higher mountain elevations as mysteriously as it had formed and breeched the continent. The Wisconsin glacier, last of the great North American ice sheets, persisted until about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

Sometime during the Pleistocene, a monumental event having incalculable consequences was to occur in a remote quarter of today’s world. As Bordes (1968:255) declared, There can be no repetition of this [event] until man lands on a [habitable] planet belonging to another star. The Americas, the largest landmass yet undiscovered by hominids, was about to be found and inhabited.

Long before the vanguards of European civilization penetrated the vast open spaces of the American West, the pronghorn was a resource for the region’s native people—mistakenly and forever called Indians. By the time humans reached the prairies, shrub-steppes and deserts of western North America, only two genera of antilocaprids persisted—Antilocapra, the pronghorn, and Tetrameryx. The latter were four-horned animals that were slightly smaller, heavier built and probably not as swift as pronghorn (Colbert and Chaffee 1939). These four-horned animals apparently were hunted and carried into caves by southwestern Indians. Roosevelt and Burden (1934) uncovered two skulls, a mandible, pelvis, some vertebrae, numerous limb bones and a fire-cracked bone in a southern Arizona cave. Colbert and Chaffee (1939) also found Tetrameryx fossils in Papago Spring Cave near Sonoita, Arizona.

Why the tetra-horned antilocaprids became extinct and pronghorn prospered remains speculative. Bromley (1977) suggested that pronghorn were pre-adapted to withstand overheating and dessication when subjected to climatic changes. Other genera may not have been as well adapted. The Antilocapra first encountered by Stone Age hunters were nearly identical to those we know today. The encounters almost certainly occurred within the known historic range of the species, as have the only known fossilized remains of pronghorn associated with aboriginal dwellings.

THE FIRST PEOPLE

. . . there is no reason to deny that antelopes . . . were not important from earliest times.

—Sherratt (1980:357)

Using new technologies, a growing contingent of specialists—archaeologists, physical anthropologists, DNA experts and linguists—are busily trying to solve the long-perplexing problem, Who were the first Americans? At least four theories find some support (see Parfit 2000). Recent findings cause some scientists to place the arrival of humans in the Americas at 15,000, 20,000 or 30,000 or more years ago (Figure 1). And, the search for evidence of America’s oldest people continues (Parfit 2000).

Those early North American pioneers did not come alone or empty-handed. Dogs surely accompanied them and were used as beasts of burden. The first Americans also made use of fire and had a few rudimentary stone and wooden weapons, such as the knife, club, spear and atlatl (dart-thrower), but not the bow and arrow. These resourceful people learned how to exist in their new, often harsh and hostile environment, gathering plant food but mainly exercising the relative nutritional efficiency of hunting large terrestrial game (see Kelly and Todd 1988).

OCCUPYING NORTH AMERICA

Whilst beholding these savages, one asks, whence have they come? What could have tempted, or what change compelled a tribe of men, to leave the fine regions of the north, to travel down the Cordillera or backbone of America?

—Darwin (1906:206)

Upon reaching North America, the discoverers from Siberia probably pressed southeastward through passages formed between the retreating Laurentian and Cordilleran ice sheets or along the West Coast (Parfit 2000). Some lingered in the North, whereas others continued southward. Martin (1967), using megafaunal biomass and human reproduction rate information, advanced the notion that people swept southward in a relatively dense wave,